Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 100: Get In, Get Jumped, Get Dead

*WARNING*
Graphic violence and gore

--------------------------------------------------------------

Nuclear war wasn't as glorious as the Apocalypse Gods and Demons talebore it to be. It was far more gloomy with anguish, as colorless as an eerie winter.

The air was soupy with dust in the collapsed passages, the radioactive fallout giving the Brotherhood's machines much to chatter about as the platoon marched. Clay-Crawler was thankful for his power armor and the air filtration in his helmet, and pitied Hancock and Richter as they grimaced and coughed out the dust from their lungs. The super mutant, Strong, didn't seem to mind, his lungs tougher. The only thing he did complain about was the 'slow metalheads' in his way. Codsworth kept his muttering to a minimum, as every time he ventured to speak, a soldier promptly told him to shut up. The raider wondered why the Brotherhood had prohibited Nick Valentine from tagging along. He was a synth and immune to radiation, too...

Scorched bodies and ghostly charred shadows limned the ground and walls. Richter explained that the heat of Atom's light could turn a man into shadow in the blink of an eye, where his vessel would remain until one day the rains of His winter would come to wash his ashes away. As for the bodies that hadn't been burnt into shadows, the leather and armor fused into meat, the faces melted until nothing remained but slushy pink flesh. In a way, they reminded the raider of feral ghouls, just without the suggestions of eyes, noses, ears, and mouths. It all bubbled into a blank, bloody slate, rousing his bile as his sickness took advantage. Had they still lived long enough to suffocate inside their own melted faces? He would have shuddered to think of it, if not for his psychopathic ways, living through a gruelling childhood in a gruelling world. The rapidity of death never ceased to awe him. How a living, breathing, and thinking thing could so quickly be blotted out of existence and turned into nothing but melted flesh and bone.

Several times the platoon was forced to a halt as collapsed rubble blocked their way. The impact of the nuclear airstrike had shaken the honeycomb structure of the caves so violently, the heat of the radiation even melting the compacted soil into clay that slid beneath their feet. A few soldiers slipped and crashed in great metal rumbles, helped back to their feet by surrounding brothers and sisters, only for those brothers and sisters to lose their footing too and create a domino effect of sliding metal avalanches. When Clay-Crawler laughed aloud at them, he too went ass over end, but the Brotherhood didn't laugh at him for their vengeance. They were too grim.

Paladin Commander Cardona ordered the blockages to be dug through with the shovels they had taken along, and it took hours of labor.

"Why not make clear with booms?" he suggested to the boss-lady one time.

She cocked her helmet superciliously at him. "You wanna bring the rest of these caves down on top of us, genius?"

It was just an idea.

Their boots chewed up red mucky clay the deeper they marched, not only melted by radiation but moist with water content, a sign they were nearing the aquifer beneath. Most of the dry dust was behind them now, clearing the air. Clay-Crawler grew excited to see the vast basin of flowing water with his own eyes, and hoped he would see it before he offered himself up to a specimen's chokehold.

Thinking of water made his throat thirst. He sucked on the drinking tube inside his helmet, amongst the last drops of water that the Brotherhood could provide the infiltration force in order to spare the very last for the wounded. If they didn't claim this aquifer they would all wither up like dying weeds and, well, die. The water was like warm silk, gritty with dirt but no less silky to his dry throat. Still, he wished it were Bloodwater. Why drink water when you could flavor it zesty?